SeeBeyond
Vitria Adds Exception Management To BPM
The exception-handling component separates Vitria from many competitors, which include WebMethods, SeeBeyond, and Tibco. “That’s traditionally been a problem area, and Vitria has built some unique capabilities for dealing with process-exception management,” says Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst for ZapThink.
Whether that strategy will be successful, remains to be seen, Schmelzer says. “It’s hard to say. Customers will have to prove whether or not they care about Vitria’s agnostic capabilities.”
Read more at: Intelligent EnterpriseSun SOA roadmap focuses on B2B
However, the Sun announcement, which proclaims this as an “SOA offering,” is still basically SeeBeyond’s B2B product with little if any service-orientation, said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC.
“Note that other than ‘enabling enterprises to realize the benefits of a SOA infrastructure framework,’ there’s really nothing service-oriented about this announcement,” Bloomberg said. “It’s squarely centered on traditional B2B integration.”
The analyst did credit Sun with a strong identity management product, which now is integrated with the mature SeeBeyond-developed technology.
“Sun’s identity management capabilities have always been the strongest part of their software offering, and the JavaCAPS, nee SeeBeyond suite, is now a mature product, but nobody should think that these products are particularly suited to the loosely-coupled, interoperability-centric world of SOA,” Bloomberg said.
Read more at: SearchWebServicesMaking Sense of SOA Governance, Service Lifecycle Management, Registries & Repositories
The Service-oriented architecture (SOA) marketplace is experiencing substantial flux, as enterprises hammer out their SOA initiatives, and vendors position their offerings to meet their customers’ needs. One particularly dynamic corner of this broader market is the SOA governance segment. The vendors in the SOA governance space actually position themselves into one or more of the following market niches: registry/repository products, policy management tools, Service lifecycle management platforms, or SOA governance tools. Even though these segments are in flux, they all share a core capability: the ability to manage the metadata that form the lifeblood of every SOA implementation.
Sun unveils new SOA platform, ESB
Yet Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink LLC, warned against reading too much into the new product designation.
“SOA is not just a market thing,” he cautioned. “And it’s not interfaces that you need to change. If it was that easy then we’d have all done it 10 years ago. It’s a complete change in the way you deliver services. We no longer think about building monolithic applications and integrating them. We think about building services and composing them.”
He said that while Sun has made some minor upgrades to the SeeBeyond offering and combined it with various Sun offerings, “it’s basically the same old stuff.” He looked to Sun’s open source communities as a potential way to shake it loose from its current integration and Java moorings.
“They need to embrace service-oriented architecture as something that’s fundamentally different from Java,” Schmelzer said. “That may be the hardest thing for them to do.”
He noted that SOA is not object-oriented like Java and does not rely on portable code.
“Sun gets into a bind when they combine the two,” he said.
Read more at: SearchWebServicesIT companies are hooking up like divorcees at a Vegas wedding chapel
The ZapThink guys have it right that this is only the second inning (given the weather, it can’t be too soon for baseball metaphors) of a nine-inning outing of SOA components and supplier consolidation.
Read more at: ZDnetSun integrates SeeBeyond, but is it SOA?
“We never recommend companies buy more integration middleware,” said Ron Schmelzer, an analyst at Waltham, Mass.-based ZapThink LLC. “That’s the tightly coupled world people need to get away from.”
Schmelzer believes the challenge facing Sun is “to make SeeBeyond customers into SOA users.”
The ability to support dynamic business processes and work with composite Web services is critical in SOA, but Schmelzer stressed that doing it in a one-to-one fashion misses the point.
“When they say service-oriented, they mean they’ve got Web services interfaces,” he said. “We’re not talking about architectures of agility here. They apply so much glue to infrastructure they end up gluing customers in place.”
That is why he believes the migration path Sun lays out will be more important than the acquisition itself.
“They need to show people how they’re going to get to a composite SOA suite,” he said. “It has to prove that it gets it.”
Read more at: SearchWebServicesSeeing beyond point-to-point integration
One of those analysts is ZapThink’s Ron Schmelzer, who opined that “we never recommend companies buy more integration middleware. That’s the tightly coupled world people need to get away from.” Supporting Web services does not automatically lead to SOA, but Schmeltzer observes that “when they say service-oriented, they mean they’ve got Web services interfaces,” he said. “We’re not talking about architectures of agility here. They apply so much glue to infrastructure they end up gluing customers in place.”
Read more at: ZDNet BlogsSun Faces Challenges with SeeBeyond Purchase
While the purchase is a good fit because the companies’ products are complementary and the companies have similar philosophies, the benefit for customers of either company isn’t as clear, according to ZapThink analyst Jason Bloomberg.
The challenge that SOA presents to middleware vendors such as SeeBeyond, Bloomberg says, is that companies simply “don’t need to buy that much new software to make SOA work. SOA is best practices. It’s architecture. It’s a discipline that may involve some software purchases, but you can build SOA on whatever you have.” In that sense, adding integration software to Sun’s existing JES suite “isn’t going to make their SOA software story any stronger per se.”
SeeBeyond, which has been losing money, will continue to face a big challenge after the acquisition, Bloomberg says, because ICAN is essentially a proprietary EAI platform. That doesn’t lend itself well to SOA. In ICAN, Bloomberg says, SeeBeyond “built a platform that supports open standards and that interoperates…and called it SOA-this and SOA-that. But it’s still a proprietary EAI platform. The pieces of ICAN work together on a very tightly coupled basis, using some of the nuts and bolts of how the Java language works. That works, but it’s not inherently service-oriented.”
Read more at: ADT MagazineSun Looks Beyond The SOA Here And Now
ZapThink analyst Jason Bloomberg said that while Sun and SeeBeyond have complementary product lines and similar philosophies with respect to Java, Sun has a spotty track record for acquisitions.
Moreover, he said, SeeBeyond’s market for tightly coupled, single-platform enterprise application integration is disappearing.
“Both firms centered their SOA efforts on Java’s write once, run anywhere portability value proposition, which is fundamentally at odds with SOA interoperability centric value proposition,” he said.
“The combination of the two companies, therefore, is shaping up as a ‘dumb and dumber approach to SOA, as competing vendors like BEA and Sonic Software hammer out solutions that better address the agility and heterogeneity needs of today’s enterprises.”
Read more at: InternetNewsSun to Expand Java Enterprise System with SeeBeyond Buy
Jason Bloomberg, an analyst at Waltham, Mass.-based ZapThink LLC, said, “Sun and SeeBeyond have complementary product lines and similar philosophies, so the acquisition is a good fit in that sense.”
eWEEK.com Special Report: Mergers & Acquisitions
“Sun, however, has had a spotty track record for acquisitions, and SeeBeyond’s market for tightly coupled, single-platform EAI is rapidly disappearing. The two companies have ostensibly been committed to SOA for a while now, but both firms centered their SOA efforts on Java’s ‘write once, run anywhere’ portability value proposition, which is fundamentally at odds with SOA’s interoperability-centric value prop.
“The combination of the two companies, therefore, is shaping up as a ‘dumb and dumber’ approach to SOA, as competing vendors like BEA and Sonic Software hammer out solutions that better address the agility and heterogeneity needs of today’s enterprises.”
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